The three catalysts for significant operational change: more clients, less staff and growing regulation complexity. How is the required growth and scale in the Australian home care sector going to be realised?

After the Royal Commission, the Australian government made home care its number 1 pillar of the aged care system reform. 40,000 new home care packages were released in July 2021, with another 40,000 coming in 2022, bringing the total number of home care packages to 275,000 by 2023, compared to just 60,000 in 2015.

However, market growth has significantly stagnated over the past two years – with very few new entrants into the market to meet the now increased HCP demand. In addition, market research highlights the increasingly competitive nature of the Home Care Package sector.  The additional competitive demand, combined with significant short staffing across the industry and the ever-increasing funding regulatory changes, are driving providers to seriously think about the scalability of their operations in the coming years.

Operationally there is increasing insight across care and coordination teams’ massive workload to meet this growing demand across service delivery and managing their customer experience.  Never was there a truer bottleneck in evidence daily.  The sheer amount of high-volume, low-value communication touchpoints that these teams endure across clients, their families and their care teams is staggering.

And more often than not, at an executive level, this is new news! – historically dealt with by trying to constantly hire (and rehire at massive cost) more coordination and support teams to deal with the increasing demand. It’s a failed and costly cycle as the staff can’t be found, and the employee churn is extreme. Overwhelmed and undervalued, they depart to greener pastures. Clients and families get increasingly annoyed at the lack of service transparency, the lack of continuity of carers, and trust and confidence in the sector erode.

Working across the sector at scale with providers for over half a decade, Hayylo has garnered invaluable insights into current operational practices. What’s surprising to some is that currently, a massive 60% of all enquiries into a provider’s office are around the same three things: “Who’s coming?  When are they coming?  Can I change something?”. This repetitive and tedious workload provides a massive burden across care teams and leaves clients frustrated with the lack of information and the ability to request something quickly. It’s the opposite experience this new home care scenario demands. 

Examining existing processes and the tools in place to best support a smarter operating model is the first step to ensure that existing roadblocks to growth are mitigated.

Both people and technology are vital to efficient care service delivery and to meet the growing demands from the government, clients, families, and the workforce. Ensuring that they are all working together is essential in empowering the operational efficiency required and ensuring high worker and customer experiences to drive both worker and client retention and to be seen as an employer of choice.

Meeting home care demand at scale for both clients and care teams

In this new world, clients and workers expect more from the provider. They demand 24×7 access to their schedules and visit details, 100% transparency on care plans and other documents important to achieve health outcomes and to be contacted in ways they choose – phone calls are not the only way. Actually, they are the most costly and inefficient channel any organisation trying to deliver an extraordinary experience should rely on. 

To future-proof home care services, providers need to spin their communications practices right now. They need to ensure that enquiries are streamlined so teams can work focused and efficiently and spend less time on routine admin tasks

Too often, we see providers confuse ‘calling’ with ‘caring’. When you remove the routine calls every time a service visit needs to change, when information can be shared once and update everyone at the same time easily and when you provide the opportunity and the focused time for meaningful calls to clients to be made, both worker and customer experiences have room to soar.

With a unified workspace, everyone – clients, families, and care teams – have access to the latest information to make the best decisions for care. They can even choose to visualise where they want it – on an app, by receiving SMS, calling a 24×7 automated call centre or via email. 

It’s an important consideration to remember that not all problems are solved with an app! Apps are great – but only a certain segment of clients and their families will want to use a smartphone – let alone an app! Providing choice across how clients can communicate with a provider and meeting clients on their terms whilst still providing operational efficiency for your care teams is essential in the overarching consideration of change.

Powering multiple support channels is easier than you think. Have you got a client management system (CMS), like Telstra Health or CarelinkPlus? Well, you can snap on a communications platform like Hayylo into your current software and quickly unburden teams of the admin and repetitive workload that constantly overwhelms them.

Hayylo is the most used care communication platform in Australia. It comes as one powerful package that cleverly combines a branded app, SMS, integrated email and integrated call centre – it enables seamless communication for teams and clients. The key is the integration that updates the single client record so double entry is eliminated and seamless views of customer interactions can be easily accessed.   

Leading providers across aged, disability and community care are already operating smartly with Hayylo and experiencing remarkable results such as:

  • 60% more time care teams get back to spend on care instead of admin
  • 70% drop in short-notice cancellations, driving greater workforce stability
  • 23% reduction in inbound calls to your office for simple enquiries

The hidden value of care team’s time

There’s real value hidden inside how care teams spend their time communicating with each other and with the clients. Imagine how much more these teams could achieve with 60% more time to spend with clients? Or with 70% fewer short-notice cancellations to manage? Providers that most astutely make use of the resources they’ve already got are the ones that will thrive in the face of the rising home care demands in Australia.

It’s time to re-evaluate the inefficient processes and outdated tools that only add more work instead of taking the workload off. It’s time to give your teams back their time to spend on more valuable tasks. It’s time to make time!

Hayylo gives care teams 60% more time to spend on what really matters. More time to rise to higher expectations and build excellent client and worker relationships for now and the future. 

Find out how Hayylo gets you there.

Originally published on the Australian Ageing Agenda.